I'm sad that my recent trip to Silicon Valley did not include a trip to this place, although I know I could not have carried much back with me. There's always a next time. Anyways, anyone know of any places like this in the Washington, DC - Baltimore MD areas?

Upon hearing the news of the botched update problem, Steve Ballmer pulled out his trusty Netbook while on the road to begin sending denial responses to the many complaints about the issue that had made their way to his mailbox. Naturally, his Netbook was set to the Windows XP default of "Download and install updates automatically" because his own trusted baby Microsoft told him it was best. Little did he know, before his last shutdown, the botched updated had downloaded and installed, and Mr. Ballmer was greeted with the famed Blue Screen he was just preparing to deny.

158 men, women and children died that day. They were found scattered through the halls of Ballmer's hotel, with but a single bloody chair wedged into a corner wall.

For me, I found that I was much less distracted when I was taking notes on paper. I had one particular class (it was a CS class) that was pretty difficult. The first half of the semester I would bring my laptop to class every day, and attempt to follow along with the Powerpoint slides and take notes on each one. By the time the midterm came up, I realized I was taking almost no notes and was spending most of my time during class on Slashdot and other distracting sites instead of paying attention. My grade on the midterm exam reflected this. To solve the predicament I found myself in, I decided to go the pen-and-paper route for the rest of the semester. Not only did my grades come back up for the final, but I can definitely say I learned a lot more in the second half of the course.

If you've got wireless internet, you've got a distraction waiting to happen. If you really need to concentrate on the lecture material, I suggest leaving the laptop at home/dorm/apartment and coming to class with a pen and some paper.

This is why I refuse to switch off Verizon regardless of what awesome deals T-Mobile comes to the table with. I hate everything about Verizon except the fact their coverage can't be beat. I have a Blackberry on AT&T provided by my company, and I will admit it gets similar connectivity in most places I go around cities. But once I go down into the Metro, or anywhere 30 miles+ away from a city, my Blackberry goes dead while my Verizon phone continues to pick up enough of a signal to make a call.

I think people neglect to decide what is really important for them when they choose which mobile carrier to go with these days. Is coverage most important to you? Verizon. Is the iPhone most important to you? AT&T. Is price and openness most important to you? T-Mobile or Sprint. Is push-to-talk most important to you? Sprint/Nextel.

I have to admit, that's got to be the best use of YMMV I've seen yet.

For what it's worth, I wrote a password keeper app for myself a while back. I offer it on my website here if anyone is interested (first link). It's just a simple .NET winforms app, but I use the built-in support for AES to store the data using AES 256 bit encryption. Probably better tools out there, but I felt like this is some pretty heavy data to trust to a random app I found on the internet, and I didn't want to have to sift through a bunch of code in a FOSS app to make sure my password file wasn't getting periodically sent to Russia. Of course by that logic you shouldn't trust me either, which is fine too :-)

There's your problem right there.

I don't understand why, in this day and age, this shit is still happening. I can think of at least 3 free antivirus applications that anyone with a Windows PC can download and use at no cost, with little or no effort required. Most COTS PCs come with some kind of antivirus software (usually the dreaded Norton, which totally blows but is better than nothing for most average users). Is the problem that people don't know that there are free solutions out there? Is it that people are willingly not installing antivirus? Are these viruses particularly good at avoiding detection? It boggles my mind that that many machines are still being infected.

I'm pretty sure that MDU Communications has volunteered our condo building to test DTN for the last year or so. I guess they figure since they have an exclusive contract with our building and we don't have any other choice of ISP (besides dial-up and capped 3G cellular), we'd be perfect. I can report that Slashdot is working this morning, although Google is not. Maybe once the system is deployed to ISS, they'll stop injecting delays and disruptions!

In a semi-related note, one of the things I miss about the pre-GPS (and even pre-Internet days) was the adventure of driving around a new place and stumbling on hidden gems. I'd love to do that in this day and age, but my girlfriend absolutely refuses to go to any resturants (for example) without doing some kind of online/zagat research first. Her rationale is "why should we waste our time going to some crappy restaurant when the Internet could have told us it was crappy before we even went?" While I sort of agree, sometimes I love restaurants that many online reviewers don't, and vice-versa. When we moved to a more upscale neighborhood, the only restaurants getting good reviews were ones that cost $75+ for a couple, and now she doesn't want to go anywhere!

I know I know, sounds like a personal problem. Still, I see a lot of public perceptions changing based on information available online and in GPS units.

Seconded. We use MQ extensively at work, and it is an enormous pain in the ass, but once it is set up properly, it does what it advertises. Basically a transaction-based message queue that promises to "never lose a message".

Rolling Roads? We have one in my town already.

...I'm very excited by this. I've been using Mono in Linux and OS X for a long time now and it has been working great. I'm not sure what Microsoft will think of this, but from what I've read thus far (which is admittedly not a ton) they haven't been getting in Mono's way... in fact, I believe that they gave information to help the Mono project so that it could be leveraged for Silverlight.

Who knows what Microsoft is going to do in the future, but for now I'm excited for Mono.

I'm surprised I'm seeing not a lot of comments here about latency issues. I live in Baltimore and I also happen to live in an area where we're stuck with a single provider for broadband internet (a condo with an exclusive contract to a horrible, horrible ISP. No, not Comcast or Verizon... MDU Communications). Before WiMAX came along, I had no option but to stick with the horrible ISP or deal with dial up. When I found out WiMAX was available where I live, I was excited. I went to one of their booths at a mall and played with it, but I was a little concerned with the latency. I was pinging google and wasn't getting a response for ~250ms. This isn't horrible for such a service, but even MDU gives me less than half that for most sites.

You might want to stop by a WiMAX booth in a mall like I did and try and make a few calls and make sure everything works as expected. They let me do pretty much whatever I wanted (in fact, the sales guy pretty much left me alone).

Yeah, I was using playing Doom as an example. Replace Doom with just about any other application that isn't a total resource hog. The specific application I'm using for my example isn't part of the point.

I am a developer and I know what developers want. I'm not saying I don't see an advantage to using all cores some of the time, but what I took from the description (no, I didn't RTFA, this is /. after all) is that Apple is trying to make it easier for developers to do something that is typically considered difficult to "get right": multithreading. The point I'm trying to make is that I don't want everything to be multi-threaded. I see why this is useful for some applications, but I don't want this to be a widespread practice.

Let me go at this from two angles. First, as a developer, in my specific job, while I can write multithreaded apps, I typically don't for two reasons: first, it's more complex to write and to understand, not just for me but for anyone else maintaining my code, and second because we tend to write many small components that do little bits of work and run them on the same machine, so we're making good use of all of our processors/cores anyway. I'm not talking about GUIs (these apps are non-interactive services/daemons), and my apps tend to lend themselves to a single-threaded frame of mind anyway, but what I'm trying to say is that here is a case where I'm getting the most out of our hardware without unnecessarily complicating things. This leads me to my second angle, which is that of a user. I already covered this above... I like multi-tasking, and I generally prefer lots of tasks that only use a single thread to having a single process run a little bit faster.

So yes, sometimes developers want the ability to use all cores for a long-running non-interactive task, and that's fine and it does lend itself to some situations. But I don't know that I want this to become the standard, which is, perhaps, what Apple is trying to push towards.